The 2011 National Magazine Awards Finalists have been announced. You have to scroll down a bunch to get to any linked articles, but once you do, there are more than a few worth clicking through. Some you've probably already read in the last year. Check it out.

Via @joelwarner

I've been traveling and I saw the George Clooney Newsweek in the airport. Cripes... At what point does it get downgraded from a magazine to a pamphlet? I remember thinking that merging a website losing about $10 million a year with a magazine losing about $25 million a year didn't seem like a good idea... I had a couple tabs opens of articles I was going to link to about this whole thing, but I lost'em all a couple weeks ago and then forgot about it until I saw Clooney's mug staring back at me from what looked like a comic book.

Vanity Fair has a habit of posting stub abstracts of their bigger articles. This isn't exclusive to VF, Rolling Stone does it, too, but it is an annoying way of using the web. Barry Ritholtz takes them to task for this, and then publishes the PDF that they sent him to drum up publicity. If you can't wait until next week to read Michael Lewis' take down of Joe C and AIG that explores among other things:

How A.I.G. F.P. became the first stop for Wall Street banks looking to insure the massive amounts of debt they were buying, packaging, and selling: “We were doing every single [credit-default swap] deal with every single Wall Street firm, except Citigroup,” says one A.I.G. F.P. trader. “Citigroup decided it liked the risk and kept it on their books. We took all the rest,”

click above for the full article.

In other Michael Lewis news, you probably knew that the Siderbergh/Pitt vehicle, 'Moneyball', got axed last week. Here's an insider's version of events that doesn't make anyone at Sony look very good. Sandra Bullock's 'The Blindside' continues to truck, and still, for some reason, no one has made any moves to make 'Liar's Poker'.

Recent interview with Davy Rothbart from Found Magazine.

I got two letters recently in the same week and they were really similar. They were two guys both writing to siblings about the recent loss of a parent. One was from New Canaan, Connecticut and one was from a small village in Kenya and they were both so similar.

Or, more likely, clumsy HTML. If you go to Esquire.com, at the bottom right of the page, next to the Hearst Men's Network, is a link to "Being Green". However, if you click on the link, you get a "404 - Object not found!" error, which is awesome and ironic in the same way that www.sarahpalin.com used to say something about intentionally blank" (not anymore, alas, the Election Time Capsule link rot has begun).

After some Googling, I found the "Being Green" website and it's linked here for your reference. Seems they do have a commitment to the environment after all.

Esquire seems to be cycling through a bottomless pit of "What I've Learned" features. Despite that they seem to be written to be SEO linkbait, I like short articles with small paraghraphs. I liked this one with Chuck Klosterman.

I'm not sure where or when I got the link to this (I'm just starting to clean out some old links), but it's a gracious and fascinating profile of Harold T. P. Hayes, editor of Esquire. Published in January 2007 - in Vanity Fair, no less - this article is fitting now as Esquire rounds out its 75th anniversary. The article is heavy on the stories from the 60s and includes Hayes' successful battle for power with Clay Felker, the mastermind behind New York Magazine. Check it out.

Hey look, Scott Raab in Esquire and Bill Simmons in ESPN the Magazine write the exact same article about Mickey Rourke in Darren Aronofsky's newest, The Wrestler: "Rourke is a jerk and he's playing himself as washed up and talent wasted". Simmons did spice it up a little at the end by telling wrestling when they can have him back as a fan.

When it institutes a pension plan for retired wrestlers, when there's an off-season that mirrors those of the major sports so bodies can recover, when it cracks down on all enhancers, when someone explains to me why I shouldn't care that so many ghosts showed up for my private screening.

Reasons to Love New York 2008.

Monday is the day The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Esquire publish most of their articles online (though Esquire is a monthly, they seem to publish all the time, even not on Mondays, so I may be wrong) making Tuesday the day that a lot of blogs I read post any stories from those magazines. I can't play the speed game so my posts generally come weeks later if at all. I like Magazine Monday and it reminds me of the Monday night excitement waiting for an album to come out on Tuesday or Thursday night waiting for a movie to come out Friday (before they started coming out on Thursday and then Wednesday). Any other days like that for you guys? Also, any other magazines that have good feeds?

Lastly, when will magazines (and certain blogs) start publishing the full articles in their feeds? It's the reason I don't subscribe to Harper's RSS and why I resent the New Yorker. On the other hand, I'm getting the goods for free, user experience be damned.